As one of the most vital and impactful pop stars of the last 15 years, Drake has established himself as a trendsetter and a canny trend-chaser across pop, rap, and R&B:
even at his most vampiric, he’s succeeded at elevating the sounds of the underground to the mainstream, and even at his most uncool, he’s proven himself as an arbiter of what’s hot to the general masses.
His track record with music videos, on the other hand, is not as sterling. Similar to Kanye West — whose album 808s and Heartbreak practically laid the blueprint for the first five years of Drake’s career — Drake has demonstrated an uncharacteristic inconsistency when it comes to the visual format.
For every hit, there’s been two misses; for every “Hotline Bling” or “Nice For What,” there’s been a “Hold On, We’re Going Home” or “Find Your Heart.” And as Drake has gotten older, his tastemaking capabilities have begun to fade; he’s an artist firmly situated in his empire era now.
This goes a long way towards explaining why many of his recent videos have been essentially IG dumps, shot in-house and capturing every cent of his luxurious lifestyle.
He hasn’t worked with Karena Evans — the only woman to direct any of his videos — at all in the 2020s, which is baffling considering she’s been responsible for much of his best visual efforts.
(Drake’s inner circle becoming even more stolidly masculine also seems, in the light of the misogyny that streaks his recent work — plus his strays towards Megan Thee Stallion and his recent conflict with Halle Berry — far from coincidental.)
By all indications, Drake is at least interested in the music video medium; why else would he pack his clips with useless, unfunny skits and overlong narrative diversions?
That tension, combined with the varying quality and questionable decision-making on display in his video archive, make for an interesting field of study.
What follows is a ranking of every Drake video, assembled according to the strength of the visual approach as well as the overall effectiveness in capturing that era of Drake’s career. We’re starting from the bottom (get it?) until we reach the cream of the visual crop.
Barely a video, but definitely Drake’s worst: This clip for the Take Care cut is literally just four minutes of a woman dancing provocatively in front of a camera in a messy room, before Drake himself makes an appearance at the end to kiss her on the head.
No wonder why there’s no director credit for this — if you were the one to put this together, would you want to admit it?
Drake reportedly scrapped this Take Care clip after both him and Colombu agreed it didn’t come out to their liking, and you only need to watch it once to understand why.
A bizarre mishmash of live footage and neon pop-art mumbo jumbo, perhaps the best thing that could be said about it is that the fact that Drake basically buried it speaks to his ability to recognize — even with a spotty visual track record such as his — when a product is simply too bad to be released with his name on it.
Unless you’re a huge Drake stan (and if you’re reading this, who knows, you might be!), you probably don’t remember this loosie of a song; even more likely is you not remembering the video, and it’s totally possible that Drake doesn’t remember making this one, either.
There’s shots of him walking off a plane runway, into a club — you know what it is. This is the type of shit Drake does in his sleep, bringing a whole new meaning to the word “effortless.”